Mirage of the Grand Design

...Considering the inspirational sentiments the alliance evokes today, its original intentions seem exceedingly modest...

...This is the second of two articles to be adapted from his latest book, Pax Americana, which is scheduled to be issued by the Viking Press on July 17...

...the latter is a by-product of the cold war...

...The Communist capture of Eastern Europe reduced the scope of this vision, but it also offered the opportunity to work on a smaller and more manageable scale in the countries west of the iron curtain...

...This is not easy at a time when the French and Italian computer industries have been swallowed by ibm and General Electric, when the British government-owned airlines are buying American-built jets while their own aircraft industries hover on the verge of bankruptcy, and when fledgling European nuclear power programs are being threatened by the American electrical giants...

...The allies cannot unleash it for a cause they may consider vital, nor prevent it from being used for a cause they may disapprove of...

...Congress, which had no intention of committing the nation's fortunes to Western Europe indefinitely...

...Once the United States and the Soviet Union developed the means to obliterate each other with weapons fired from their own territory, the importance of their European allies inevitably diminished on their scale of strategic priorities...

...What we must not do, however, is confuse this community of values shared by the diverse peoples who border the Atlantic with a particular form of political organization between America and Western Europe...

...Advanced technology has rendered the nato bases, with their elaborate military pipelines and their brass-heavy bureaucracies, far less necessary to the defense of Europe...

...In so doing he has tried to show that Europe must be something more than a pawn in the struggle between the super-powers...

...But the so-called Americanization of Europe, reflected in supermarkets and motels, is really little more than Europe's postwar adaptation to mass-consumption and mass-production...

...America's postwar role as protector of Europe is in danger, for the Europeans no longer feel so threatened...

...Yet how can the Europeans keep control when they do not have the continental markets and the enormous federal research funds enjoyed by American corporations...

...The former is a living reality based upon 300 years of shared history...

...What was reasonable in 1949 is often unreasonable today...

...America's impact on postwar Europe has been enormous in everything from the packaging of soap to the packaging of culture...

...There is nothing anti-American in the desire of European farmers to sell the crops that beneficent Nature has provided, but it does mean that the United States cannot expect much longer to meet its payments deficits by selling surplus food to Europe...

...Although an admirable design for trade liberalization on the classical model, it is full of pitfalls the Europeans are determined to avoid...

...For both sides the most vital concern has switched from the defense of ideological allies to the prevention of nuclear war...

...The declining need for overseas bases has stimulated not only a strategic revolution but a political one as well...

...More than $2 billion is invested in West Germany, another $1.5 billion in France, and nearly $1 billion in Italy...

...What is essential in contemplating the future of nato is that we not allow ourselves to become prisoners of our own rhetoric, to pursue roads that are no longer open, to proclaim goals that are no longer possible, to substitute a certain conception of Atlantic unity for a reconciliation of Europe, to impose an abstract solution upon an intractable problem, to become so mesmerized by projects that we lose sight of our ends...

...But just as the alliance would not be the same as the organization we call nato, so the alliance would not necessarily be the prelude to an Atlantic community...

...It is because they do not want to see their industries crushed by mass-production American imports that they have retained an external tariff...

...A guarantee of nuclear support against aggression simply does not now have the credibility that would make it a fully effective deterrent and therefore a guarantee of security...

...And it is because they want something more than a simple free trade zone, more than a European supermarket, that they have rejected Britain's plans for diluting the inte-grationist ambitions of the Common Market...

...has found an eager market in Western Europe for its farm products...

...Such criticism reflects a deep anxiety among the allies that the interests of Europe and America —however similar they may be—are not identical where questions of national survival are concerned...

...From these economic disagreements—which are only a shadow of more important political differences—it is apparent that there has been much unjustified optimism, and even cant, in Washington's Grand Design...

...In fact, the United States does not appear to take its own strategy seriously, since it has pulled troops out of Europe to send to Vietnam, and is now withdrawing 12,000 men from the 225,000-man American Army in Germany...

...Faced with such a threat, Europeans believe, the Russians would never dare risk even a conventional probe...

...A unified Europe would want a dominant voice in working out an eventual political settlement with Moscow, and in time it might even find a tamed Russia a useful ally in balancing the overwhelming weight of American economic power...

...Our alliance with Western Europe represents our stake in Western civilization, but the lands beyond the iron curtain, and even Russia itself, are also part of the civilization...

...Europe," declared Gaston Deferre, the Socialist Mayor of Marseilles, "will be colonized by the United States unless we decide to pool our resources in order to create industrial concerns comparable in size to the American ones and able to compete with them on an equal footing...

...The time has come to stop mourning over formulas that served so well in the past, over blueprints for the future that are already obsolete...

...For the past 20 years the U.S...

...These economic disagreements have revealed just how much undue optimism there has been in Washington's vision of a free trade area within the Atlantic community...

...and the USSR have developed a mutual interest in keeping their allies out of the nuclear business...

...Today, as in the past, the Europeans have no real control over American strategy, nor over U.S...

...capital...

...American diplomacy has run parallel to European interests because it has been based upon the military containment of Russia...

...Although some of its offspring are often forgotten or ignored, nato remains close to our hearts...

...The avalanche of American corporations jumping the Common Market tariff wall by setting up European subsidiaries has stimulated charges of "economic colonialism" that are no monopoly of the Gaullists...

...America has been deeply involved in European affairs for half a century...

...Our satisfaction with the stability and security of today's Europe has been muted by our disappointment over the failure of nato to stimulate the united European community we desired...

...Nor did Washington ever seem to realize that Europe as an equal partner would want to be equal in the implements of power—that it would expect to have its own economic policy, its own diplomacy and perhaps even its own Bomb...

...As a result, the allies have refrained from building the 30-division army the Pentagon has urged upon them...

...Europe is important, but it is only one of the areas of concern vital to the United States...

...A politically-unified Atlantic community was a noble dream: But it is no longer so desirable as it once was to a Europe now in search of reconciliation, and to an America which may be tempted to achieve a private accord of its own with Russia...

...It can be done only through unification—by the expansion of the Common Market across the Channel and eventually across the Elbe...

...for basic research, will ultimately reduce Europe to the role of an economic satellite?fated to produce American-designed products in American-owned factories on American licenses...

...The Russians have become outspoken practitioners of "peaceful coexistence" and have been more interested in holding their own shaky political bloc together than in threatening Western Europe...

...The Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam clearly revealed the limits of collective decision-making within the alliance, as well as the United States' interest in other spheres...

...Prosperity has modernized the face of Europe, rebuilding its cities and jamming its narrow streets with cars...

...This became clear when the Europeans realized that the United States, as the richest and most powerful partner had no intentions of tearing down its tariff walls, sharing its deterrent or subordinating the U.S...

...The Common Market has become not only America's single most important customer and supplier, but also a magnet for U.S...

...Whatever their friendship toward the United States, the members of the Common Market have a primary obligation to their own family...

...The Kennedy Administration's dream of a Grand Design embracing America and a united Western Europe in "equal partnership" is beginning to seem unduly optimistic and even outdated...

...Because of Europe's vital importance to our national interest, we must remain deeply concerned by what happens on the Continent...

...An Atlantic community may be desirable, but it can never be built at the expense of a European community that would bring the Communist nations of the East back into the European family...

...It was also a bit improbable, for the allies did not have the same conception of partnership as Washington...

...Because of these rather dizzying changes in strategy, nato has come to mean something different, and perhaps a good deal less, than it did in the past...

...The European problem is not how to keep American firms away, for Europe needs American capital and technological skill, but how to make sure control of the European economy remains in European hands...

...Perhaps one day it may be resurrected in another form, but in the new climate of detente, the emphasis in Europe is on reconciliation with the East—and in Washington on collaboration with the Soviet Union...

...This does not mean that America and Europe must, or will, become hostile, but rather that the relentless pace of industrialization may be stimulating differences even as it creates similarities...

...Such an alliance would be less subject to American direction than nato has been, but even General de Gaulle has underlined the need for an Atlantic alliance that would assure Europe of U.S...

...While it might be a partner to America in areas where their interests overlapped—such as the containment of Russia—it would have interests of its own to pursue, and the strength to make those interests felt...

...The same rule holds true for Italian oranges and tomatoes, for Dutch butter and cheese, for German hogs...

...But this does not make us a European power—any more than playing a saxophone turns a man into a musical instrument...

...Within recent years there has been a mounting invasion of American dollars into Europe, which today is in excess of $5 billion in the United Kingdom alone, and $6 billion on the Continent —or six times what it was in 1954...

...American ownership means that major areas of the European economy lie outside the effective control of European governments...

...The Europeans have recovered from their wartime wounds to such a degree that they can now ponder the possibility of a reunited Continent from which both Russian and American troops will have disappeared...

...In many respects this infusion of American funds has helped stimulate and expand European industry, providing the technical know-how and the competitive spirit that has been lacking...

...For this reason the British maintain their mini-deterrent, the French develop their force de frappe, and the Germans suffer from a nuclear inferiority complex...

...But unless there is some kind of wider economic integration, Europe cannot hope to compete with America as an equal...

...It was an inspiring vision: noble in sentiment, honorable in aspiration, and deeply felt in its idealism...

...The alliance does not depend upon the organization, and the demise of the organization does not preclude the possibility of a continuing alliance...

...They have little patience for our intervention in Latin America, are not particularly concerned by the expansion of Communism in Southeast Asia, and share few of our nightmares about China...

...Ten of these transport planes could have handled the Berlin airlift...

...Applying the virtues of our own federal system to the chronic troubles of the Continent, we believed that the Europeans could end their endemic rivalries by forming a more perfect union: a United States of Europe...

...Having achieved so much of what it initially set out to do, nato has in a sense become the victim of its own success...

...This was what came in time to be known as the Grand Design: a blueprint for a transatlantic partnership between the United States and the western half of Europe...

...When the United States pledged itself to Europe's defense in the late 1940s, it was virtually invulnerable to Russian retaliation...

...Seizing upon the widespread discontent with the subordinate role to which Europe is still confined, de Gaulle has tried to establish France as the leading challenger to American "hegemony" in Western Europe...

...Tariff reductions have been achieved where they were to the advantage of both parties, but the hyperbole of Atlantic partnership has not secured American products a privileged entry into the Common Market, nor induced the Europeans to take on a greater share of foreign aid for the underdeveloped countries...

...It could not be expected to remain permanently dependent on American protection, since it has the capacity to build a Bomb of its own, nor would it be content to play deputy sheriff to Washington in the unruly states of the world...

...Inspired by this vision of a post-nationalist Europe, statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic drew up blueprints for a united Continent with a single army, a single parliament and a single diplomacy...

...For most Americans, nato was always more than a mere defense alliance: It was to be the means by which the old European enmities would be healed, by which Germany could make peace with her neighbors, by which corrosive European nationalism would be buried, and by which the states of Eastern Europe could eventually be pried loose from the Soviet Union...

...These two great societies are on parallel rather than identical tracks, as the Americans consolidate their own unique civilization, and as the Europeans strive to maintain the cherished values of their shared history and to seek a new future in some form of unification...

...control of all nato nuclear weapons—as a partial retraction of the old nuclear guarantee...

...But in that game nobody enters the arena with clean hands, not even the United States...

...But what would be "limited" for the super powers, would most likely be total for their allies...

...nuclear protection...

...The Common Market nations are, in a sense, protectionist...

...European apprehension about American competition has spread to agriculture as well...

...It is compounded of pride in what Europe has accomplished during the past two decades, embarrassment at being totally dependent upon the United States for protection, apprehension at the growing role that American industry plays in the European economy, and fear of becoming involved in America's revolution-squelching interventions...

...But by its concentration in certain key industries, it has given rise to apprehension over foreign influence...

...How can they hope to challenge the United States in the basic growth industries when a single American firm like General Motors has annual sales greater than the Gross National Product of the Netherlands, and of 100 other countries as well...

...hands...

...Everywhere there are complaints, suspicions, and in France, outright rejection of nato itself...

...Without doubting America's good faith, some of the allies have begun to wonder whether the President of the United States would unleash nuclear missiles on Russia in retaliation to an attack on Europe—knowing that this would almost certainly mean the destruction of the United States itself...

...As they try to build large-scale industries for their expanding consumer markets, the Europeans have become alarmed by the level of American private investment on the Continent, and particularly by its concentration in such vital industries as computers, automobiles, chemicals, synthetic rubber, agricultural machinery and photographic equipment...

...Fearful of being dragged into an atomic conflict against their will, the U.S...

...Even those Europeans most desirous of some form of Atlantic partnership see a united Europe as something more than America's alter ego and spear-carrier...

...European purchases helped cover the deficit in our balance of payments caused by overseas military expenses and foreign aid...

...As Washington has become increasingly preoccupied with "wars of national liberation," the Europeans have given vent to a detachment that is not yet neutralism, but that determinedly resists involvement...

...Now intercontinental missiles and Polaris-firing atomic submarines, long-range F-lll fighter-bombers and giant military transport planes have drastically reduced the need for such strategic bases...

...The purpose of nato, according to the report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which approved the treaty, was to "facilitate long-term economic recovery through replacing the sense of insecurity by one of confidence in the future...

...It is no longer, if it ever was, a united body where the defense of one is the defense of all...

...Even in such mundane affairs as economics, European and American interests are not identical, and sometimes not necessarily complementary...

...President Johnson has wisely put into the deep freeze his predecessor's plan for a multilateral nuclear force (mlf) under mixed nato ownership and control, and has firmly told the Germans that their desire for nuclear sharing must take a back seat to the Russo-American detente and the wider interests of European peace...

...Joined by a common heritage, sharing common cultural values and common riches in a world of poverty, America and Europe are still not necessarily political partners...

...In effect, this means that American farmers will be restricted to leftovers...

...Thus the allies much prefer the old strategy of "massive retaliation," which threatened the Russians with instant obliteration should they move across the Elbe...

...Rather, it was conceived as a simple guarantee of American protection, meant to tide the Europeans over until they were able to provide for their own defense...

...The Russians have not the slightest intention of giving atomic weapons to their East European comrades, and the United States has discouraged France's efforts at nuclear independence...

...what was visionary in the mid-1950s is reactionary in the late 1960s...

...a political union between America and Western Europe —nor any other kind of union for that matter...

...Only West Germany remains committed to a massive American military presence on the Continent, but this is precisely because Bonn has been unwilling to face the political consequences of partition and, through nato, has been able to chain the United States to a policy in Central Europe that runs contrary to its attempt to maintain a detente with Russia...

...Today whole divisions can be flown across the Atlantic in hours...

...From a fragmented, fratricidal Europe there would arise a great new power in the world, one which would be an "equal partner" to America in the Atlantic alliance, and which would exert such a powerful attraction on the Communist states of Eastern Europe that the Russians would be forced to relinquish their empire peacefully...

...The allies who once beseeched our help are today chafing under what they term our "hegemony...

...Because of the intercontinental missile, however, the U.S...

...diplomacy outside the Atlantic area...

...Whether this will happen remains to be seen...

...Europe will probably always remain our first line of defense, as it has long been the source of our deepest cultural ties...

...By pledging our lives, our honor and our wealth to the war-weakened nations of Western Europe, we rejected the isolationism that two world wars had rendered obsolete and sought a new community with our friends across the Atlantic...

...currently faces the same danger of instant obliteration that the Europeans have faced from the start...

...A united Europe of 180 million people in the richest and most industrially-advanced nations of the earth would be a great power in its own right, capable of defending itself and pursuing its own foreign policy...

...Indeed, it is not certain that nato can survive much longer in anything like its present form...

...Outside of Europe the allies, including the Germans, have retained a discreet distance from American diplomacy...

...But the same mechanization that modernized Europe's factories has also modernized its farms, to the degree that the Common Market now has a farm surplus problem of its own...

...However much we welcome new American investment here as in other parts of Europe," British Prime Minister Harold Wilson declared in words that sound suspiciously Gaullist, "there is no one on either side of the Channel who wants to see capital investment in Europe involve domination or, in the last resort, subjugation...

...Free Europe must develop its own personality in order to become a partner for America and to serve as a magnet for the countries of Eastern Europe...

...All along there has been a good deal of wishful thinking in the assumption that the United States could indefinitely sell its farm surpluses to Europe...

...But modernization is not the same thing as Americanization, and the differences between America and Europe run deep —in culture, in society, in personal relations...

...In this "little Europe" some of the great experiments in postwar cooperation were introduced: the Marshall Plan, nato, the Coal and Steel Community, Euratom, the West European Union, and perhaps most important of all, the Common Market...

...The long and painful Kennedy Round negotiations on mutual tariff reductions have dramatized just how determined the Europeans are to protect their economic interests, and how much leverage they have gained through joining together in the Common Market...

...More important, he has expressed, and helped to create, a sense of European resistance to the United States that is complex in its origins, but quite widespread in its effects...

...From an American point of view, this is eminently reasonable and desirable...

...In the long run, it may make it even more desirable for the peoples of the New World as well as of the Old to guard their cultural differences as a means of preserving their identities...

...This effort, it was hoped, would be accomplished within 20 years...

...In fact, they rather admire China for its accomplishments, see it as a potential market for European goods, and recognize its usefulness as a counterbalance to Russia in the East...

...The Atlantic demands our attention, but so does the Pacific and the Caribbean...

...Partnership," in the words of Walter Hallstein, president of the Common Market Commission and thus Europe's highest-ranking bureaucrat, "means the opposite of a monolithic Atlantic community in which the European states would play the part of a bridgehead toward the East, as were the Hellenic settlements in Asia Minor...

...Many fear that the enormous American lead in growth industries like electronics, plus the vastly greater amounts of funds available in the U.S...

...The American deterrent, which comprises about 95 per cent of nato's nuclear power, rests entirely in U.S...

...A community is one form of political organization, but it is not one natural to nations separated by 3,000 miles of ocean and with great discrepancies of size, wealth, power, interest and ambitions...

...Among the larger allies there is a feeling, expressed by Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, that: "An alliance for defense only is an anachronism in the world of 1966, especially when nuclear power is not shared, by possession or by control, among its members...

...The answer is that Europe cannot compete unless there is a domestic market comparable to that in the United States, unless European industries are able to merge into cartels as large as the American ones, unless there are massive infusions of government funds into basic research, and unless American corporations can be prevented from controlling key areas of the European economy through subsidiaries...

...These fears are not as imaginary as they may seem to skeptical Americans...

...Congress to a European parliament...

...By detaching France from nato and throwing out her diplomatic lines to the emerging countries of the Third World, he has gained a freedom of maneuver for France that is denied the other members of the alliance...

...To many Americans it symbolizes our acceptance of world responsibility as the protector and defender of Europe...

...This problem is particularly acute for France, which, as the granary of the Common Market, has demanded that its farmers be given privileged access to the European food market...

...Militarily, the Europeans were never able to offer the United States much more than advanced bases to strike at Soviet power...

...It was not intended to be the foundation for Ronald Steel is the New Leader's roving European correspondent...

...They fear that the United States and Russia, in order to spare themselves atomic devastation, might prefer to conduct a "limited" war on European soil...

...The United States is still the world's greatest military power, but its defense policy for Europe is based upon a threat to commit national suicide...

...A Europe which is becoming absorbed in the quest for reunification, will not remain forever tied to a military alliance premised upon the indefinite division of the Continent...

...Within the restricted scope of the Atlantic Pact it promised the hope of One World that had been frustrated by Soviet ambitions and the collapse of Great Power unity...

...Yet now, after nearly 20 years, that dream has begun to go sour...

...The reality de Gaulle has unmasked is that the conditions originally responsible for the alliance have been overtaken by events...

...It would, as is already apparent, hardly share Washington's mania about China...

...But now that the fear of Soviet attack has subsided in Western Europe and American attention has strayed to the unstable states of the Third World, and convergence of interests between United States and its nato allies have begun to disintegrate...

...As the nation which bears the major responsibility, and the major cost, of defending the Atlantic area, we clearly cannot tolerate having vital decisions over our security made anywhere but in Washington...

...America is an agricultural surplus country, but so is France?and although French grains are not as cheap as American grains, France is inside the Common Market and the United States is not...

...Europe faces West toward the Atlantic, but it also faces East toward the Urals...

...Some profess to see the Pentagon's new strategy of "flexible response"—with its call for larger European armies to prevent a war from immediately "escalating" to the nuclear level, and for U.S...

...Based upon the foundation of a common civilization and a common danger, nato set the precedent for a series of global alliances...

...42 of them could complete in half a day the transfer of 15,000 troops to Europe that required 234 airplanes in 1963 and took nearly three days...

...Around nato we built our postwar diplomacy of containment and intervention...

...Equality, if it is to be anything more than rhetoric, means the ability to follow independent policies...

...This cannot be achieved through an Atlantic community, since this would only institutionalize Europe's technological weakness...

...The issue facing us today is not one of holding desperately to an organization that was conceived in the late 1940s, or of trying to force the Europeans into certain rigid forms of political union, but of encouraging the creation of a political climate that will allow the two Europes to reconcile their differences and achieve a wider community stretching across the Elbe...

...Having twice been drawn into Europe's civil wars, we believed that Europe had to be made into something better than it had been...

...For this reason, the member nations were given the option to drop out after 1969—a provision particularly important to the U.S...

...Although nato seems doomed to extinction as a military organization, some form of military cooperation is likely to continue between America and Western Europe so long as our allies feel themselves threatened by the Russians...

...An expression of the cultural, economic and social bonds between America and Western Europe, the Atlantic community will always exist as a manner of speech and a frame of reference...

...nato, in other words, was to be the military component of a formula that had the Marshall Plan as the basic ingredient: a temporary wall behind which the Europeans could patch up their wartime wounds and rebuild their defenses with American economic aid...